To mark Human Rights Day, PHR hosted a conversation about how health professionals can use their skills and platforms to document and call attention to human rights violations.
December 7, 2022
Asylum, Attacks on Health Care, COVID-19, Persecution of Health Workers
Medical professionals are often on the front lines in conflict situations, providing life-saving health care to civilian communities suffering from violence, abuse, and deprivation. Nowhere has this been truer than in Syria.
Destruction of the health sector is a signature of the conflict which continues to unfold in Syria. It has occurred in the context of one of the most severe humanitarian crises in the world. Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) and others have documented deliberate attacks on health care facilities and personnel during the past 10 […]
Each day, the United States government unnecessarily locks up thousands of people, including children, in civil immigration detention in more than two hundred immigration detention centers around the country. People may be detained for many months – even years – as they await final adjudication of their cases or deportation. Trapped in a system marked […]
Under the Trump administration, more than 5,500 children were forcibly separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border as part of the U.S. government’s policies to punish immigrants. When Jacob Soboroff, NBC News and MSNBC correspondent, first saw the conditions in which children were being held by authorities at the border, it was a sight he says he will never forget: “I didn’t fully […]
As editor-in-chief of The Lancet, Dr. Richard Horton led the charge in telling the story of COVID-19; a new virus that was rapidly killing millions and extremely difficult to contain. Dr. Horton made it his mission to encourage nations to mobilize more quickly; since then, Dr. Horton has become one of the sharpest critics of the […]
As a deadly pandemic raged on, Dr. Uğur Şahin and Dr. Özlem Türeci – physicians, immunologists, cancer researchers, and BioNtech founders knew that expansive knowledge of mRNA vaccine technology gave them the potential for creating the first COVID-19 vaccine. In collaboration with Pfizer, Dr. Şahin and Dr. Türeci were able to do just that in an unprecedented 11-month timeframe, enabling many across […]
After Laredo Medical Center’s first positive COVID-19 patient in March 2020, it quickly became the epicenter of the pandemic. As cases continued to rise, Dr. Ricardo Cigarroa made the difficult decision to close his cardiology practice and shift his focus to fighting COVID-19 head on. Affectionately called the “Dr. Fauci of South Texas,” Dr. Cigarroa turned his practice into a COVID […]
As the coronavirus pandemic began to escalate in Orange County, California, it became clear that additional measures to protect the community needed to be taken. In May 2020, the former Chief Health Officer for Orange County, Dr. Nichole Quick, instituted a county-wide mask mandate. Dr. Quick faced enormous opposition from both the community and county supervisors, ultimately […]
